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What this is, is the second of about four or five Praguevlog videos all taken on a walk the same evening. It carries on from the film A Summer Prague which you’ll find in the Travel and Places category – Czech Republic on this blog. This part starts in the Andel area where I’m looking for something to eat, and then start to walk home, and notice that a lot of the advertising on the sides of the streets as well as the reliefs of the buildings in the area seem to have a 3D motif, such as the U Buldoka sculptured pub sign. It is all in great light and in HD, with a selection of nice background tracks, as in this case, and some effects too now and again. This gives you some of the essence of Prague in the summer.

No music in the sound track of this one, but some more nice music is coming up in later parts of the walk…

What this is is the first of about four or five Praguevlog videos all taken on a walk the same evening. One colleague took me back to Prague from outside in his car – we had been doing a due diligence out towards the West – and I got out a while away from the centre so as to give myself the opportunity for a walk in the lovely weather. I came into the Andel area by tram, which is the part you see here, and then in the forthcoming instalments you’ll see how I walked home from Andel. And it is all in great light and in HD, with a selection of nice background tracks, as in this case, and some effects too now and again. This gives you some of the essence of Prague in the summer.

I forgot that I had this bottle in my briefcase, but naturally the detectors as I passed from streetside to airside at Prague found it.

Now clearly they all recognise me as having been through there eighty or so times before, so there’s no terrorism alarm bells ringing, and you can see how they’re in two minds about whether or not just to let me get on with it. But in the end the three of them say no, they have to do things by the book, which mean that the wine is thrown away.

I’m there saying to them, just take it and drink it yourselves, it’s a sin to throw it away. And of course as they know that I’m a regular, they also know that there’s no risk I’m trying to poison them, give them an exploding oesophagus, or anything like that.

It’s not the loss I’m bothered about. I could make that up just by drinking the free wine that’s flowing like milk and honey (there’s milk and honey too, in the fridge) here in the Lounge. It’s a bit early in the day for me, though, and I’m actually not a big fan of alcohol despite what readers of my blogs and viewers of my vlogs may think.

It is a bit sad that it happened to a present. But most of all it’s pity to see something like that just thrown into a bin and not enjoyed by anybody. When anyone can see there’s no real risk there. It’s just the over-zealous application of a rule book.

That’s the real shock. That’s what’s really saddened me and sent me running to the production corridors of WordPress to get it off my chest.

Here we have, in nice HD coding, a walk around in Prague, showing some of the flavour of the experience of being in the Czech Republic – including this very strange thing that happened to me last Spring.

Here, in the city of Kafka, I was seriously summoned to court without being informed why. Just like Joseph K in ‘Der Prozess‘ or ‘The Trial’ by Kafka. You really couldn’t make it up.

I don’t want to talk about the facts of what the case turned out to be, (especially as one party of it graces some films of mine on YT, which will also be shown here) but to my relief I only actually needed to be a witness. I have no wrongdoing as such on my conscience, but I have been known to sack people, and they get given more rights than I do when it comes to court, even if there’s no earthly justice in it. But this wasn’t even someone I had sacked. Because I didn’t know that, I had to go to the expense of a decent lawyer who naturally deserved to be paid for his appearance despite not in the end having a decisive role. But in the end I didn’t get annoyed about it, as it was something truly Kafkaesque in the city of Kafka which I’ll be able to remember and joke about for the rest of my life.

I also talk a little bit about learning Japanese and the kitsch for sale to tourists in Prague.

I thought I’d spice things up with a poll! Remember this is not the number of cases you’ve seen – you may have been more than once. Count is as number of days you’ve ever had to turn up. Don’t count it if you went along just for entertainment.

Here we have number 41 in my series of PragueVlogs uploaded here before the other 40 are here because I’m doing 2011 and later video uploads here as they happen and inbetween times the older stuff in chronological order.

This talks a bit about where the channel is going, and if you like you can watch it on a fuller screen and do pauses for some quite panoramic shots of Prague as I keep this one in HD.

At the point where I talk about the midgies on the bridge if you make it full screen and pause it there, you’ll see what I mean by the size of them!

Here we have the next currently uploaded video, the last in the Budapest series, and a rather long one which I probably should have broken up into shorter ones, but the first parts show a huge fishtank at a place we were dining one evening and also a spot of Vaci utca and Belgrad rakpart, before the main event, which is me walking with two heavy cases about 5 km to the railway station.

I wasn’t planning to walk with them all that way, but I was open to the possibility, and that’s what ended up happening, but it became a pretty hefty bit of exercise.

The train journey itself turned out to be awful. The train was supposed to arrive in Prague in the middle of the night at about 2 or 3 o clock, and then in the end didn’t get in until 6 in the morning. It stood still in the Czech Republic for hours with no-one giving explanations, and the Spanish guys in the next carriage were going nuts as nothing like that had ever happened to them before.

I grabbed a couple of short naps but not enough, and then finally for the last few hours in Brno after someone else got in the carriage while I was having a nap and laid completely down over the other side, with his shoes off making a bad smell with his feet, and that was the end of my comfort. In Pardubice a third entrant came to the carriage. It had been a bit more bearable up to the point where I had had privacy, but the last hours really started dragging.

Generally I quite like trains, but I really wasn’t keen on that one. And apart from anything else it was old and shabby and not like most Czech trains I’ve been on at all.

If you want to see the four earlier parts of the 2010 Hungary series, or indeed the Hungary series from three years back, for now they are on my YT channel http://www.youtube.com/usenetposts and they’ll all be added here when I get to them.

As promised, starting from the beginning of 2011 I’m posting here the new YT uploads as they happen over there, as well as carrying on doing the ones that are 4 years old in chronological order. This is one of the newly uploaded ones, although I actually did it in the summer. I still have a similar routine, with the slight difference that I plane to fly out and back once every two weeks this year, rather than every week as it has been for the last year and a half.

By the way the currently uploaded (on or after 1/1/11) video will have the abbreviation (CUV) on and so you will be able to tell which which video posts are the ones uploaded now from the ones which I did 4 years or so ago. Another aim of mine is to try and keep within 5 years if I can. That may well be over ambitious on my part. By the time I get the last of those 2010 uploads up in chronological order they may well be seven years old. At this rate it could seriously take seven years to get this all the way I want it! But then … wot larks! I just hope YT is still around in 2017 in order to get there. And all of us, including me with my flabby health risks, for that matter.